A STORY OF SUGAR FROM A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

This is a compilation of the history of the sugar cane industry in Corozal. We have at best made every effort to be accurate on the information compiled. It is an important part of Corozal’s history.

Photo: Libertad Sugar Factory today taken by CD

The closure of the Libertad Sugar Factory in 1985 created extreme hardships for the Northern region of Belize, particularly the Corozal District where the Libertad factory was located. The direct impact of this factory closure was a severe job loss. This resulted in thousands of Belizeans, mostly Corozaleños, to migrate to the United States of America and Mexico. A lot of these farmers and their families began to lose their homes and lands as security to the local banks. Many Asian merchants began picking up these foreclosures at rock bottom prices.

Sugar cane production has been in the jewel as early as the 1800’s. Perhaps only the norteños knew its economic and social development in Corozal for the most part.

Between the Spanish conquest and 1848, the Corozal region was virtually uninhabited. The British were interested only in its timber resources which depleted soon after, and in turn forced them to venture into sugar cane production. In 1857, a hundred barrels of sugar produced in British Honduras were sent from Belize to Liverpool. During these early years sugar cane was planted, much by small growers in rural Corozal. During the 1860's several British investors established sizeable estates in the Corozal region which, in contrast to the earlier mestizo haciendas, may be referred to as plantations. During the 1870's and 1880's these estates gave the haciendas serious competition. The latter continued to plant and process cane for both rum and sugar, but the British planters moved decisively into the export market. Twelve estates were established; three of these were near Orange Walk. While the earlier haciendas were operated by animal power with the simplest of machinery, these estates were steam driven, mechanically sophisticated, and quite large. The plantations, like the smaller haciendas, cultivated both sugar cane and sufficient subsistence crops especially corn to feed the owner and labourers. The British plantations in Corozal were short-lived. From a record of two and a half million pounds of sugar in1882, exports fell to about 200,000 pounds in the early 1890's. In the early 1900’s the establishment of the Corozal Sugar Factory was the result of the colonial government's concern over the declining level of exports. The original plans for the factory called for a central processing plant to be located in a central location, Pembroke Hall, to which would be attached a plantation owned by the same company. The bulk of the canes, however, were to be supplied by the six surviving mestizo-owned haciendas namely: San Juan Saltillo, Aventura, San Francisco, Pueblo Nuevo, Louisville, and America.

Most of the Mestizo and Maya families which were the majority of the Corozal and Orange Walk populations had come into the colony as refugees after the Caste War began in the Yucatán in 1847. The Caste War lasted for most of the second half of the twentieth century, and the story of the war was buried, both in Belize and the Yucatán, because it was a dirty war, and the elite in both Belize and Yucatán had things they wanted to hide.

By 1935, the Libertad sugar factory was built on the New River in the Corozal District. Factory operations began in 1937 in the formerly known Pembroke Hall sugar factory now Libertad; the results were dismal when the goal of 2,500 tons was not reached until 1953, export levels remained extremely low. As late as 1953 only 812 tons were exported. By 1954 only three of the original contractors were still in existence; these three delivered 7,357 tons that year, slightly over half of that delivered by 122 small producers. Twenty-five percent of these small producers were from the remote village of San Narciso, which had been the principal cash level corn-producing Maya village during the 1930's. It was expected that British Honduras would be allowed to export 25,000 tons annually under the terms of the 1951 Commonwealth Sugar Agreement. In 1956 a subsidiary of the new ownership formed another company, known as Plantations Limited, which began to buy private lands throughout the region. It soon became apparent that Plantations Limited had expansive tastes, and opposition from within the peasant sector began to emerge. Then Governor Hornley attempted to subdue opposition by announcing in a speech given at Louisville early in 1957 that the 25,000 tons export quota had been confirmed by London. Many British Hondurans were not convinced of the Governor's sincerity and his understanding of the situation. In an issue of a newspaper then where his speech was recorded, editorial remarks were made in all probability written by George Price of which was applauded by many. By 1960, sugar production in the north reach its zenith...everyone was getting into the act. Former subsistence farmers began to switch to sugar.

Photo: Sugar Factory Pembroke Hall (archives)

After the British brought in the West India Regiment to crush the Icaiche leader, Marcos Canul, in Orange Walk in 1872, the Mestizo and Maya masses in the North were subjugated by the British until Hon. George Price, whose mother was a Mestizo from Orange Walk, became the PUP leader in 1956. Things began to change.

The liberation and rise of the Mestizo/Maya North in the 1960’s provoked ethnic resentment in the old capital (Belize City) from the black community. There was a lot of ignorance in Belize back then. The British had designed things this way, so that they could keep ethnicities separate from, and suspicious of, each other. The history shows that the British did this all over their colonial empire. Divide the natives, and rule them. Corozal and Orange Walk had been isolated from the old capital (Belize City) from time immemorial, because the roads were left very bad (whether intentional or not). What wealth existed in the colony before sugar, had been concentrated in the old capital, whose demography was dominated by black Belizeans who had developed an attitude of superiority. Not only were black Belizeans a majority in the capital and in the country, they were the primary native allies of the real rulers, the British colonial masters.
Belize’s various ethnic groups have learned a lot about each other since the 1960’s (so we think), even though there is still substantial ignorance. Around the time of self-government in 1964, a British company named Tate and Lyle, the world leader in sugar refining, invested in Belize. By 1967 the modern Tower Hill sugar factory was already in production. The Libertad factory already existed, so both Corozal (Libertad) and Orange Walk (Tower Hill) then had their own factories, and sugar cane farming became a boom industry. It was the biggest thing Belize had seen. People from all over the country of Belize migrated to the sugar belt looking for work, and the areas around the factories became ethnic mixtures.

One point we want to make in this essay is this: the cane farmers in the sugar belt had been downtrodden before the Tate and Lyle investment, and they were very proud of their new, hard-earned wealth and success. Just as the black capital (Belize City) had developed an “attitude” when they dominated the country in colonial days, now the North developed an “attitude” as the socio-economics of the old capital began to deteriorate.
The expansion and modernization of the Belizean sugar industry in the 1960’s meant that the cane farmers raised their standard of living substantially higher than before. But there was always a tension between Tate & Lyle’s Belize Sugar Industries (BSI) and the roots cane farmers. In Belize City, well they never saw or understood this. When First World companies invest in Third World countries, most of the cake is repatriated to the metropolitan nation. It is only the crumbs which remain in the native land.

The Belizean sugar industry, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, experienced large production and export swings. In 1981 an estimated 30 percent of farmland, formerly used for growing sugarcane, had been abandoned. Yet, at the end of the 1980s, the United States increased its quota for Belize at the expense of Guyana, which was not reaching its allotment, and in early 1990, BSIL reported its largest-ever bulk shipment (17,300 tons of raw sugar) to Canada.

Yes, in the beginning, the crumbs were perhaps more than the natives have seen before. Some families became very wealthy in the North off sugar cane, but there are many poor cane farming families who still struggle like other Belizeans. Whether that was so or not, it is for sure today that the cane farmers need the revenues from their bagasse. They deserve that. There were decades when it seemed to the rest of Belize that the North was on top of things compared to the rest of the country. And in 1985 in the Belizean North, the United States of America targeted the weed fields that grew side by side on some sugar cane fields. They sprayed the marijuana plantations with highly toxic weed killer “paraquat” not considering the health risks to the poor innocent nearby cane farmers and their families. By this time, the rise and fall of sugar prices on the world market had already begun to make the economics of the North unstable, from time to time. The spraying of paraquat has been the demise of the health of many poor cane farmers who have succumbed from ailments and birth defects as a direct result of the paraquat spraying. The reparation and compensation of the paraquat spraying from the United States of America and the Government of Belize to all those poor cane farmers is something yet to be legally exploited by those families who today, continue to be affected by it.

Unfortunately, US demand for sugar crashed in the 1970s and the Libertad factory closed in 1985. While sugar cane is still the dominant crop, all is now processed at the Tower Hill plant near Orange Walk, where molasses, Belizean rum and refined sugar are processed for export.

Until 1985 Belize had two sugar mills: the Libertad factory in the Corozal District, opened in 1937, and the factory at Tower Hill near Orange Walk Town, opened in 1967. In July 1985, the Libertad factory was closed. By early 1989, Libertad had been reopened and leased to the Jamaican petroleum company Petrojam. Petrojam was to use Libertad for the production of molasses, which was then to be refined in Jamaica into ethanol. Ethanol had duty-free access to the United States market under the Caribbean Basin Initiative.

In Belize small farms in the north produce the bulk of the sugarcane. In the early 1990’s, the coordination of the agricultural aspects of sugar production and the organization of cane delivery were the responsibilities of the Cane Farmers' Association. The industrial segment of the sugar-production process was controlled by Belize Sugar Industries Limited (BSIL). Overall coordination of the industry was exercised by the Belize Sugar Board.

As the 1990’s began, sugar was still the Belizean economy's single largest export foreign exchange earner. Sugar production involved a unique hybrid of agricultural and industrial activity. Sugarcane cultivation, on one hand, and the mechanical chemical transformation of cane into sugar, on the other hand, made for this peculiarity. Both processes needed to be coordinated because of the perish-ability of the crop.

Photo: Remnants of Libertad Sugar Factory as it stands today

In 1997 constant neglect of the then ruling Government, forced the closure and operation of the Petrojam sugar factory which once pumped millions of dollars to Libertad and the northern region of the country. The remnants of a once vibrant production factory can only be overshadowed by a dilapidated and looted structure. Today over 40,000 acres in the northern lowlands is reaped each year by approximately 6,000 cane farmers and processed at the Belize Sugar Industry that began operation in Tower Hill Orange Walk and more than 35,000 norteños depend on the sugar crop.

The main point we want to make in this essay today is this: the Northern cane farmers’ present fight for a share of the revenues from bagasse is a Belizean fight. All of us Belizeans should be supporting the cane farmers in their struggle, and the cane farmers should be reaching out to the rest of the country for support.